(L) Anda French and (R) Jenny French Image © Steph Larsen

Through the power of self-funded, self-initiated projects, Anda and Jenny French use their passions in graphic design, academia, and architectural discourse to produce thought-provoking work. As a smaller design firm, the Boston-based duo, French 2D, champion the importance of autonomy and prototyping. As educators, both approach practice and academia by creating opportunities for people to be candid and critical, valuing conversations based on questions of "What is it?" and "Why is it?" 

For this week's Studio Snapshot, the sisters talk with Archinect about the importance of preserving a sense of autonomy in their practice, stressing that their approach leans more towards that of an art collective than a traditional architectural firm. Further, Anda and Jenny go on to discuss how the future of architecture is changing as it relates to their involvement in academia and as women in the field.

How many people are in your practice?

2-4. Our office is primarily the two of us, with one or two additional people working with us for specific projects.

What originally motivated you to start your own practice?

Our creative process works better when we have a degree of autonomy. Internally that means that we can be more vulnerable in our working methods and allow ourselves to be free of hierarchical judgment – in many ways we are more art collective than traditional architectural firm. Externally, this makes the design process more fluid and we can better collaborate or pivot with our clients on the spot.

What is it like working with your sister? Did you both know you wanted to become architects? 

We spend our days in a bright office, bouncing ideas between ourselves, and generally making light of as much as we can. In this respect, not much has changed since we were kids. Working together is like being in our own heads, but together. We always knew we wanted to work this way, and architecture fit the bill.

What hurdles have you come across?

We have chosen to take many risks but we reposition them on our own terms. One of the obvious hurdles in this profession is the conflict between the timeframe that built projects take and the desire to test and externalize ideas quickly. The more typical resolution is to enter competitions in which a firm can play out their project with more immediacy. Instead, we have redirected the financial risk one takes in devoting resources to an uninvited competition towards self-funded, self-initiated experimental projects. We find that within this model we can prototype, deploy, and engage with the real world in ways that are satisfying in their immediacy and constructive as the basis for longer term projects.

Do you have a favorite project? Completed or in progress. 

If judged by final result, our recently completed Outlier Lofts is our favorite built project to date. We designed it through a representational and theoretical framework, we oversaw its construction, we had it photographed as an architectural object and environment. At that point, we had a crisis about inhabiting it with objects. So we took an experimental approach to question what it is to inhabit a built architecture with objects in the first place.

If judged by process and future product, we love working on our current in progress project, Bay State Commons Cohousing. Its strange status is that it must act as a single house, and as a collective set of 30 dwellings for up to 100 inhabitants with multiple levels of shared public and private space. You can imagine that getting 50 clients to agree on design decisions is a huge undertaking, but the series of 10 design workshops we’ve led with this group have been some of the most fun client meetings we’ve ever had. We have invented a set of participatory design models that have put at the center of the process the agency of the user and a productive collaborative process. Through this process it also means that the community is being built before we break ground.

As educators, how do you see the future of architecture changing? What advice do you give to your students?

In architecture schools, we are educating agile thinkers by asking them to operate beyond the scope of the traditional practice brief, but when they want to work this way in the real world, we bemoan losing them to other fields.  Architecture’s future is contingent on adapting the definition of its reach and claiming success when our training fits into other modes of practice.

In school, there is a lot of pressure to engage and anxiety around what opinions to have at this point in your education. For some students this is the easy part. For many, however, figuring out what you believe requires becoming self-aware of how you think through making. Language is essential in our work with students. Using specific simple words to get to greater understanding with our students is key. Speaking plainly is important -  we ask ‘what is it?” and “why is it?”

Blending academia with architectural practice, can you talk more about Now Practice Now? What stemmed its creation? 

Our work in academia and practice found a middle ground in our planning the Now Practice Now Series and Summit. Along with a small group of colleagues at the BSA, we ran three workshop panels and a summit that answered the BSA President’s call to examine the future (and present) of practice. The two of us advocated for being intentionally naïve with specific panel topics that recategorized practice with a provisional and accessible set of terms, Cash, Stuff, and Turf.  

Using these terms to describe the basic elements of practice, allowed us to ask practitioners to reflect on basic elements of practice in a folksier, friendlier way. The accessible nature of these conversations allowed participants to be candid and critical, which aligns more with an academic pedagogical approach of abstracting ideas to produce distance and speculation.

Your architectural drawings and renderings are quite beautiful. They showcase strong color and graphic motifs. After looking through your graphic works, can you talk a little more about how graphic design influences your practice/process? 

We are most interested in the moments of tension in architectural and graphics work where new, imagined, or recaptured depth emerges and can redefine a project. We move between representation and artifact with our drawings, exploring the use of strong color and pattern to produce diagrammatic meaning and pictorial depth, sometimes separately and sometimes simultaneously.  

Large-scale building graphic projects present a perfect site for this work, as they wrestle with the relationship between surface and volume, drawing and building. Our Kendall Square Garage project is a good example of this. We were asked to create 26,000 square feet of permanent façade drawing. We argue that the wrapped garage must be presented as a proto building, read through the multi-scale articulation of its façade. We used a pattern of multiple scales, transparencies, and figures to play with distance, depth and character.

The only way to move forward is to redesign the culture that made these transgressions possible, which is the same culture that, despite evidence to the contrary, has counted women out of it. We hope we are moving to a culture in school and in practice that counts and listens to women, not just when in crisis, but listens to women, full stop.

What does it mean to be women in architecture today? Architecture seems to finally be catching on to the #Metoo movement, any thoughts on how this is changing or not changing things for women?

Beatriz Colomina’s recent work on the history of female ‘silent partners’ in male/female architecture partnerships is powerful. It illustrates the reason for the so-called absence of women’s influence in our profession. The New York Times’ recent article, “Where are all the Female Architects?” and the subsequent resounding response from Madame Architect and others of “We’re Right Here” (now #WeAreHere) proves that not much has changed in cultural perception. The #Metoo movement is about believing and listening to women in the context of abuse, harassment and other crises. The only way to move forward is to redesign the culture that made these transgressions possible, which is the same culture that, despite evidence to the contrary, has counted women out of it. We hope we are moving to a culture in school and in practice that counts and listens to women, not just when in crisis, but listens to women, full stop.

If you could describe your practice in three words what would they be?

Tactical, cheerful, communal.